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Witness To Luis Ramirez Killing Speaks

Posted December 19, 2009 by Patrick Young, Esq.

Soledad O’Brien of CNN has written an extended piece on the killing of Luis Ramirez in Shenadoah, Pa. in 2008. Four police and two teens have been charged in Federal Court following an investigation by the FBI into the killing.
The article contains extensive statements by Eileen Burke, who lived right next to where Ramirez received his fatal injuries. Burke is a former Philly cop who moved back to Shenandoah when she retired from the police force. She was one of the first on the scene when the attack on Ramirez took place.
In May, regular readers know that I was shocked when Burke was not called to testify in the trial of two of the six young men involved in the killing. The FBI now says that local law enforcement was trying to cover-up the killing because investigating cops had a personal, even a sexual, relationship with the mother of one of the accused.
Here is what O’Brien says about what Eileen Burke told her [I have inserted bracketed info on who the people are]:
Eileen Burke’s house is right in front of where the attack occurred. She is a former Philadelphia police officer who left the force after her leg was pinned between her patrol car and a drunk driver in 1995. She got an injured-on-duty pension but couldn’t live off $30,000 in Philadelphia, so she returned to Shenandoah, her hometown. Eileen is a strong woman with a square face who never felt like she fit in around Shenandoah. People treated her poorly.
That day Eileen had driven 12 hours with her roommate to get home from a trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and was lying around her room being exhausted when she heard a group of teenagers screaming “the F word and saying ‘Mexican’ this and ‘Sp**’ that.” She had complained to the Shenandoah police about noise from the park in the past but they didn’t treat her seriously. “Go get an AC,” she said they told her. When she heard the voice of a woman screaming “stop kicking him, stop beating him,” she decided to turn the AC off and stepped outside.
Arielle Garcia [a friend of Luis Ramirez] later told a CNN reporter that she arrived just as Luis was walking away. Then the kids started screaming racial slurs, like “Go back to Mexico.” Luis got mad and came back. But this time the rest of the teenagers joined in and the fight ended up six to one, according to Arielle. “My husband tried to break it up. It happened so fast. My husband tried to get kids off of him,” she said. Hers was likely the voice that alerted Eileen that something awful was going down.
From her window, Eileen says she saw this group standing in a circle around someone screaming ethnic slurs. She calls 911 and throws on some clothes. She says 911 in Shenandoah frustrates her. She reports a fight, begs for an ambulance, gets transferred. She finally throws down the phone and runs out. As she’s stepping out onto her porch she hears this horrible sound.
“It was like a poof. Like when your car hits a pothole of water, really terrible. I’m a cop so I know what that sound is. You know how it sounds when someone gets a blow,” she said. As she rushed down to see what’s happened there are only two teenagers standing close enough to have delivered the blow, she says, Colin Walsh and Brandon Piekarsky [later charged with delivering the fatal kick]. Piekarsky rushes toward her.
“He puts his chest into me but as a police officer I know I can’t touch him. He looked totally startled when he realized that I know him and Colin.”
The two of them run off and Eileen is left standing there with Arielle and Luis.
“I’m thinking the ‘poof’ sound was from his chest. Foam was coming out of his mouth. He was convulsing. We called it the death rattle when I was a cop in Philly. I just kept saying to him to please hold on. I didn’t want to even try CPR because of his condition,” she said.
Off in the distance she says she saw car lights coming down the street the wrong way. She says Colin kicked the door of a parked car and yelled to her “you effin’ bitch.” Down the street she says she also saw Brandon.
“The blondie is banging on the hood of a car and yelling ‘you tell your effin’ Mexican friends to get the hell out of Shenandoah,’” Eileen said.
She asked Arielle if she knows them and Arielle said that they are schoolmates. Eileen said police cars took a long time to arrive and when they did they were not from Shenandoah but from neighboring towns. She says she ran up to each of them urging them to get an ambulance there. Shenandoah Police Chief Mark Nestor says the response was quick and that he is proud of the job his officers did that day. He says small towns typically pool police resources and have whatever agency is available respond first. It’s not unusual that officers from other jurisdictions would be the first on the scene, he said. He is satisfied that the Shenandoah officers who did work the case did their best that day.
“They kept telling me to shut up. It was unbelievable. They didn’t even approach him and he’s lying on the pavement obviously in a lot of pain. He is calming down. I’d say going deeper and deeper and all I get are these questions about whether he’d been drinking and if anyone knows how to spell his name,” she said.
She says she heard neighbors talking about the teenagers needing to call their mothers. She says Brandon’s mom works at a local bar and dates a police officer.
“No one is offering to chase the boys. It was unbelievable. I’m sitting on my stoop until 2 a.m. and there is still no crime scene, no one chasing suspects, no one even interested in interviewing me or getting a description. Luis just lay there. All the cops are in the park looking for something, talking on their cell phones. This was an open-and-shut case where all these kids should have been picked up and charged that night. I was sick. I couldn’t breathe. ... He’s not an animal. It’s human life.”
A day after the incident, Eileen says that Crystal [Dillman, the mother of Ramirez’s children] came by with Luis’ aunt and uncle to thank her.
“I didn’t have the heart to tell them how much he’d suffered. That he was out on the street making a death rattle and no one was doing a thing. I could barely walk out the door and look at the spot the next morning.”